Site Mobile Navigation

A Disconnect on Hooking Up

WHEN Laura Sessions Stepp warned of the potentially damaging effects of “hooking up” in a new book, some people scoffed — particularly those who believe they were unscathed by their own unfettered years of casual sex.

Others, though, were incensed.

In “Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both” (Riverhead), Ms. Sessions Stepp, a Washington Post reporter, writes about how smart, ambitious young women do emotional damage to themselves by getting physical — making out to having sex — with men they are not dating or may have met for the first time.

In the book, which she based on her reporting over the years and a two-year study of nine high school and college students, age 15 to 21, Ms. Sessions Stepp, 55, concludes that such encounters have largely replaced dating among high school and college students across the country.

This culture of sexual aggression, she said, often leaves young women physically and emotionally unsatisfied. It leads them to gamble with their health. And by never taking the time to get to know and care about one man, she said, young women may be rendering themselves incapable of forging stable, loving relationships.

“They’ve got the head stuff, they’ve got the body stuff down,” Ms. Sessions Stepp said this week in Washington. “It’s matters of the heart where I think they could be smarter. And that was the piece I hoped I could help them think through.”

To critics, the book, which was published on Feb. 15, is an odd throwback — not only retro in its point of view, but also out of sync with the current climate of high-achieving girls who are usually applauded for focusing on their careers and their female friends, rather than on finding Mr. Right.

Salon.com likened “Unhooked” to a “50s-style handbook on appropriate femininity.” Slate magazine said it is alarmist and “makes sex into a bigger, scarier and more dangerous thing than it already is.” A review in The Washington Post by Kathy Dobie, the author of “The Only Girl in the Car,” said that Ms. Sessions Stepp “resurrects the ugly, old notion of sex as something a female gives in return for a male’s good behavior.”

Many of the critics do not question that hooking up is common in the age group that Ms. Sessions Stepp singles out. In fact, while studies show that fewer teenagers are having sex, other studies of students at individual universities show that the hookup is the predominant way that students sexually interact.

But no studies draw a line between the hookup culture and either clinical depression or a lifetime of remaining single, the critics point out.

Photo

Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Ms. Sessions Stepp said she agrees that some women are able to hop out of bed the morning after a hookup, feel great about themselves and think, “That was cool, now I’m going off to chemistry.” And if that is so, she said, that is fine with her.

But, according to her research, most young women do not happily untangle themselves from the sheets and hightail it to class, she said. Instead they obsessively check their cellphones to see if Mr. One Night Only called. They feel bad about themselves and lose the opportunity to learn how to build a relationship. That they are high achieving is not the point, she said.

Ms. Sessions Stepp said, in the quest to get ahead, women have put their hearts on hold. “But at what cost?” she asks. “Do you want to harden your heart to the point where you don’t know how to feel when you’re ready to get into a relationship?”

Strangely, as her ideas have been derided by advocates for sexual freedom, traditional family values groups have not yet weighed in.

For her part, Ms. Sessions Stepp said she is hardly an antifeminist: “People don’t know me, or what I fought for for so many years.”

Ms. Sessions Stepp, who won a Pulitzer in 1981 as an editor on a series on brown lung disease, said she helped fight for equal pay early in her career, when she discovered that women journalists at The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin were being paid less than male counterparts. She said she divides the housework with her husband, a college professor. In college, she worked to eradicate single-sex dorms.

Equality was a part of her upbringing, she said. Her father was a minister who advocated for integration in the South and her mother was among the first women to earn a Ph.D. in psychology in Arkansas.

Perhaps that is why she seems to take chilly reviews in stride.

“I understand their anger because in this current political climate women’s choices are being threatened,” she said, “the right to choose an abortion, the right to live with a same-sex partner.”

It has led many women to be wary of any suggestion of limits on their lifestyle choices, she said.

The outburst of criticism has exposed a generational divide between Ms. Sessions Stepp, whose battles for women’s rights focused mainly on equality in the workplace rather than in the bedroom, and some members of a younger generation who equate feminism with sexual freedom.

Photo

Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Ms. Sessions Stepp said that she welcomes criticism, though not from people who have not read the book or who have never conducted research.

“This is what I love about the bloggers,” she said. “They haven’t been out there interviewing young people for 10 years. They’re talking about their own college experience. Everyone’s had some sort of sexual experience and they all think they’re experts on it.”

Ms. Sessions Stepp’s dating experiences in high school, like those of other women of her generation, could be described as traditional. Boys picked her up on her doorstep. Some gave her friendship rings (which her father then made her return).

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

There remains, in the way she carries her slender frame, an air of old-fashioned femininity. She wishes more young people would embrace dating and romance (the better to get to know each other). She wants women to feel free to express their femininity (lipstick and heels, why not?). And she thinks the best sex is with someone you love, not someone you just met in a keg line.

“Real power is not giving it away, but using it wisely,” Ms. Sessions Stepp said. “That’s when you’re liberated, really.”

Her son, Jeff Stepp, 22, who thinks “Unhooked” is on target and gave his mother access to his friends and an ex-girlfriend for it, said the hookup culture is not necessarily bad for everyone. “She argues a good relationship cannot stem from a hookup because you’re putting the sex before the feelings,” he said of his mother. “I was arguing that it can and it has for me.”

“I’m just a little more liberal in my thinking,” he said, though he added that hooking up is “not the optimal way” to kick off a relationship.

Miriam Datskovsky, 22, a senior at Columbia University who documented the sex lives of her peers for two and half years in her Sexplorations column for The Columbia Spectator, said she sees two type of relationships on campus: hooking up or intense monogamous relationships known as the “college marriage.” Dating exists, though only among older students, she said.

While hookups obviously pose problems for certain students, the sky is not falling, she said.

“As an overall thing, I don’t think there’s anything to be concerned about,” Ms. Datskovsky said. “College is the time when you make most of your mistakes.”

Photo

SINGLED OUT Laura Sessions Stepp writes about the hookup culture.Credit
Andrew Cutraro for The New York Times

But Mary Yeotsas, a Barnard senior, said that dating is more emotionally satisfying than merely hooking up. “You feel you can sit down and have a conversation with someone,” said Ms. Yeotsas, 21, “and they are interested in what you’re saying, instead of having a drunken conversation at a party that could end in the back of somebody’s room.”

The quaint joy of being wooed is not among the most griped-about elements of “Unhooked.” That distinction belongs to this paragraph: “Tying one on can be fun occasionally. Just don’t let it take over your social life. Organize weekend getaways and other events to bring people together. Bake cookies, brownies, muffins. Ask your girlfriends for assistance. Guys will do anything for homemade baked goods.”

Ms. Sessions Stepp said she anticipated fallout from those lines, but was simply pointing out there are other things to do for fun.

“I said to my editor, ‘Should I use that line?’ ” Ms. Sessions Stepp said. “He said, ‘Well, it’s going to get some people mad, but you know what? That’s good. We like controversy.’ So I said, ‘Well, O.K., just so they don’t ignore my book.’ ”

They didn’t.

Meghan O’Rourke, the literary editor of Slate magazine, who reviewed “Unhooked,” said the baking advocacy paragraph “seemed an unusually starkly old fashioned moment.” Yet the book has a bigger flaw, she said. Namely: “Why talk only about women?” (Ms. Sessions Stepp said it is because women are the sexual gatekeepers.)

In the end, Ms. O’Rourke was not convinced hooking up “was as pervasive and damaging across the board” as “Unhooked” suggests. “We tend to romanticize a safer past,” she said, “and to invoke a really dangerous and threatening present.”

This may be why some critics of Ms. Sessions Stepp portray her as a disapproving mother figure tut-tutting the perils of unchecked lust.

She prefers to cast herself as a benevolent guide, from an older generation of feminism, who deeply cares about today’s bright young women.

In an e-mail message sent to Ms. Sessions Stepp, a senior at Tulane who bought “Unhooked” at the university bookstore said, “I felt like you were almost writing my story.”

Ms. Sessions Stepp said her goal is to retool, not reject, feminism. “Really, when you look at it, hookup culture is gravy for guys,” she said. “So how much are we winning?”